Recently, Russ Jones, ex-principal search scientist at Moz, asked on Twitter: “What do you think is the most underrated SEO tactic?” And the answers are ones you can’t afford to miss.

Most companies understand the value of organic search and while some rely solely on popular “best practices”, others spend a lot of time experimenting to find out uncommon actions that generate higher returns for their business.

Experimentation is becoming a critical tool marketers need to use to deal with Google’s ongoing evolution and changes which impact their businesses organic visibility and acquisition efforts.

According toRand Fishkin from Sparktoro statistics show that over 50% of Google searches result in no clicks in June 2019 and this trend has been steady growth since 2016.

Everyone knows thriving in a dynamic industry is hard, however, it is not impossible.

According toFastCompany: “Businesses need to do things differently in a way that creates a competitive advantage”.

A competitive advantage that will allow your business to provide more or better value to organic search users than any of your competitors.

Let’s dig deeper into the most underrated SEO tactics you should consider to make things differently and get a better return on your organic acquisition efforts.

SEO tactics #1: Updating content

“CTRs are gone. They’re not coming back, but engagement on social is not falling off, So the shift in strategy then has to be okay, how do you drive engagement within those platforms and how do you grow an audience within those platforms and then once you have that audience, what do you actually do with it.”

— Meghan Keaney AndersonVice President of Marketing at HubSpot

Most marketers focus their attention on creating new content, without looking into performance and user engagement over time, you must know that old content can be more valuable than new content because it gives you a better understanding on how you can improve it for your users.

It is vital to refresh your content based on user behaviour, feedback and new technologies (which is, Featured snippets), once this is done properly you can expect a boost in visibility and traffic.

Stop creating content like most people do a bunch of words targeting a topic, instead, create content that actually educates or entertain your audience.

Remember that we are not in the 90s anymore and you need to create something exceptional to be able to compete against content kings like Google or Netflix.

How to do it:

Updating content requires time and effort, but you can work efficiently by boosting the old pages that still rank well.

Content Audit (not relevant for brand new sites): You must do proper traffic analysis and find out where your traffic is coming from. You might be surprised to see that a significant amount of it comes from old pages. If this is the case, you don’t have to rewrite the entire content.

Let’s see a few tips:

You can check it to be up-to-date and change the outdated parts

Add a few useful information, maybe a few subheadings or other relevant keywords

Reorganize the information to be more user-friendly

Add multimedia

Fix eventual spelling or grammar errors

Case study:

To better understand the power of refreshing old content, here’s a short case study fromanimalz.co:

The updated post received 90,137 pageviews in the time given, compared to an estimate of 59,927 pageviews. This is a significant difference of 30,000 pageviews during the observation time, which shows us the potential to refresh and why you should consider it.

Updating old content can be pure gold for your SEO tactic. It is an underrated strategy, so you must benefit from this and see it as an opportunity.

SEO tactics #2: Internal linking

“Internal links aren’t just for you. They’re for your readers. So make sure that each link is helpful.”

— Jeffrey Kranz Co-founder of Overthink Group.

Internal links connect content within your site, provide support to user users and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. Based on the internal linking, Google can establish a hierarchy and provide the most link value to the essential pages.

According to Kevin Indig, the right structure depends on the type of site, business. Every website has a different kind of internal linking, and choosing the right one for your business can boost your SEO results.

Internal Link Structure Report Form Screaming Frog

How to do it:

Define your site structure

Crawl Your Site

Calculate internal PR and CR

Add backlinks to get “true PR”

Add crawl rate form log files to understand impact of (internal + links) over time

Case study:

volume research of 388.190 on keywords ranked in the top 100 compared to 103.000 before linking.

SEO tactics #3: Branding

“Branding is our only hope for conducting better SEO.”

— Brad Smith Founder atCodeless.

All marketers know how important branding is for businesses. A brand inspires trust, and this increases the SEO results because users will be more prone to click on your website if they know about your company. And this is a hint for Google algorithms that your site has high authority and rewards it with good rankings.

Google prioritizes the search results mainly taking into consideration the user; the search engine does not recognize brands per se.

If a user clicks on your website links, it shows the search engine that trusts your brand. It’s a win-win situation and you should take advantage of this opportunity, investing in branding.

How to do it:

Invest on Discovery Channels

Encourage Branded Search

Create something special

Case study:

We can take a practical example. You sure are familiar with Uber, the ridesharing company.

This company had the highest brand awareness compared with its competitors, and the statistics show us that they have high revenues online and, of course, many customers.

Search Demand for “Uber”

Even though the company struggles with some legal issues with drivers who allegedly committed serious violent crimes against customers, and those concerning news are shown in snippets, Uber still gets a lot of clicks.

This is possible due to good branding. Customers know this company, and even if they see the negative news, their trust remains. Is it true though that Uber could do a better job at SEO, still has impressive results and can be aiming for more.

SEO tactics #4: CTR optimization

“Look at a SERP that you want to dominate. It’s going to look pretty similar (even boring), so do something to surprise the user. Make your offer sound exciting and better than the rest.”

— Kirsty Finlayson Content Strategist at Holded

CTR stands for click-through-rate and is a calculated metric that shows you how many users clicked on your website link out of the total number of people who saw it. CTR is an essential part of SEO strategies.

If your site is ranked well, let’s say that it is shown on the three positions in the search engine page, but only a few users click on it, this is a sign that you need CTR optimization.